Linda Bondestam
“Everything began with a circuit board.” This is how Linda Bondestam’s picture book Chop Chop – en tapper jordbos berättelse (not translated into English) begins, telling the story of a small, sweet robot designed to be helpful. Always smiling, Chop Chop works round the clock, unaware of the consequences for his human coworkers who can’t keep up with his relentless pace. That is, until the day Chop Chop himself is outperformed by an even more efficient robot – and is also “given the boot”.
Chop Chop’s odyssey through a future world - where AI and robots who can’t feel empathy take over and spiral out of control - reflects a very present threat. At the same time, these bleak prospects are cleverly contrasted with the charmingly kind-hearted protagonist’s unwavering sense of what truly matters. Not even when runaway automation culminates in a full-scale nuclear war that wipes out everything does Chop Chop give up—instead, he starts anew, building a new and better world.
Bondestam jokingly refers to her picture books Mitt bottenliv – av en ensam axolotl (“My Life at the Bottom: The Story of a Lonesome Axolotl”, Yonder 2022, trans. A. A. Prime) and Chop Chop as autobiographies. Both portray the downfall of humanity with a humorous tone that carefully preserves the reader’s hope for the future. In Chop Chop Bondestam curiously explores the picture book format through landscape panoramas, illustrations that bleed beyond their frames, and an unusually high page count for a picture book. The contrasting yet subtly smudged colour palette works effectively alongside sharp and concise phrases and snappy dialogue. Form, colour, and text combine seamlessly into a cohesive and compelling picture book narrative.
With Chop Chop, Bondestam continues to boldly explore the picture book format both in content and form. As in My Life at the Bottom, she demonstrates a unique ability to (children’s) literarily portray burning contemporary societal issues. Neither climate catastrophe, war, nor the end of the world are foreign themes in this cohesive body of work, which warmly and rebelliously insists on conversations about the conditions for life on our planet. Even within the themes of robotics and AI versus working life under capitalist terms, Bondestam manages to squeeze out a hopeful vision of new possibilities.
Linda Bondestam (born in 1977) is a multi-award-winning picture book artist and illustrator with more than 40 books under her belt. In 2017, Ulf Stark and Linda Bondestam’s Djur som ingen sett utom vi (not translated into English) won the Nordic Council Children and Young People’s Literature Prize. Chop Chop is Bondestam’s fourth entirely solo picture book.